Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American for Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view.
As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but just not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s
What We Fight For statement of purpose for educational purposes only:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Marxism And The Jacobin Communist Tradition-Part Two -"Blanquism" ("Young Spartacus" March 1976)
EDITOR'S NOTE: With this series Young Spartacus makes available for our readers a contribution presented by Joseph Seymour, a Spartacist League Central Committee member, at the mid-January Spartacus Youth League West Coast educational conference held in Berkeley. "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition," reproduced from the verbal presentation with a minimum of editorial abridgement, seeks to debunk the academic/New Left view of Marxism as a self-contained derivation from Hegelian philosophy by reaffirming the shaping influence of the experiences, programs and world-views of two generations of revolutionary militants who sought to fuse the bourgeois-democratic revolution with an egalitarian collectivist social order. The first part, featured in our February issue, discussed the Great French Revolution and the legacy of its insurrectionary and most radical wing, upheld by the revolutionaries Babeuf and Buonarroti.
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The history of the French revolutionary movement after the overthrow of Napoleon Bonaparte is the history of the polarization of the left opposition to royal absolutism into its bourgeois conservative, revolutionary democratic and communist component of revolutionary democracy, which simultaneously was transformed through proletarianization.
The two key dividing lines were the successful revolution of 1830 and the Lyons silk weavers’ insurrection of 1834.
Now, at the beginning of this period, 1815, the left opposition to the Bourbon Restoration had three main tendencies. First, the liberal bourgeoisie, whose economic policy was laissez faire, whose power base was the very restricted parliament based on a limited franchise, whose political program advocated not democracy but rather an extended franchise and certain rights, and whose main leadership was the wealthy nobleman Lafayette.
Second, there were the Bonapartists, who were mainly centered in the army and whose program was roughly national populism. Until Bonaparte died in 1821, they stood for the restoration of Bonaparte: "Let's kick these foreigners and their lackeys out of France." Revolutionary nationalism. But they were not committed to economic laissez faire; they could make certain populist appeals to peasant economic protectionism, and in that sense were even demagogically to the left of the liberals.
Then there were the revolutionary democrats, who in this period (1815-1820) were almost exclusively limited to the student population of Paris. And the vanguard was a small group of revolutionary democrats who, being illegal, took over a masonic order and named it the Friends of Truth, whose leader was a rather reputable and important figure named Saint Amand Bazard.
These three forces united in their mass on two occasions: the Carbonari Conspiracy of 1821-23, where they were defeated, and the revolution of 1830, where they were in a military sense victorious. But that victory split those component parts asunder.
Carbonari Conspiracy
I will just say a few words about the Carbonari Conspiracy, which was important. First, it had a genuinely mass character, encompassing at its height probably 80,000 activists. In France every revolutionist who was mature, and even some who were not mature, was a member of the Carbonari. It provided the first revolutionary experience for that generation. The 17-year-old Louis Auguste Blanqui had his first revolutionary experience in the Carbonari and his later secret organizations were modeled on the Carbonari—only cells of three and only one person in the three knew anyone in the cell above, so one had a hierarchy which sealed off the leadership from the base.
In 1821, in response to the gains of the liberals in parliament, the Bourbons moved to the right and rewrote the parliamentary laws. The liberal bourgeois opposition in effect said, "Well, we have no choice but to engage in insurrection." They contacted the radical students and the disgruntled Bonapartists and even democrats in the army, organizing a conspiracy whose main strategy was the subversion of the army. The Carbonari Conspiracy, thus, was a democratic mutiny in the army, financed and organized by the liberal bourgeoisie, utilizing the student radicals, each seeking to manipulate and utilize the other.
But the army, in the absence of a general social crisis, was isolated and sufficiently loyal to the regime that the Conspiracy did not work. When someone would say, "Psst, you want to join?," he would get turned in and would be executed. So there was a whole series of executions and abortive mutinies.
The suppression of the Carbonari had a significant effect but, interestingly enough, the various forces involved maintained a kind of good will toward each other. They drifted apart. The liberal bourgeoisie went back to parliamentary game-playing. The student-based revolutionary democrats, however, did something interesting. They decided to do some fundamental rethinking of political doctrine, and they soon discovered an eccentric nobleman named Saint-Simon, who actually died about the time they began reading his works.
Discovery of Saint-Simon
Saint-Simon was not a socialist, he was not associated with the revolutionary movement, but rather he was a technocrat who believed in state economic planning. He inherited the Enlightenment tradition. He said, "Capitalism is obviously irrational, production is obviously ungoverned, and I can think of fourteen different ways to improve the economy, but there has to be some kind of centralization."
So Saint Amand Hazard and his circle for a couple of years read this material and came out as the first socialist organization with a revolutionary democratic tradition. They were not an odd sect; they actually had experience in revolutionary politics and a real sense for political power.
Saint-Simonism, therefore, was the first politically significant socialist tendency, although Owenism in Britain, by a very different process, was also achieving a semi-mass character. Saint-Simonism also spread through Germany—one of Marx's high-school teachers was a Saint-Simonian socialist—and was the first basic socialist doctrine to penetrate the continent.
While one tends to think of early socialist movements as being very primitive, in fact Saint-Simonism was the most technocratic of any socialist doctrine, not the most primitive. And it reflected the close organic ties between the radical democrats-cum-socialists and the liberal bourgeoisie, which at that time was very alienated from the state apparatus held by the Bourbons, who believed that they were living in the seventeenth century. So, certain elements of bourgeois technocratic socialism tended to penetrate these circles and became quite faddish. Only in a later period, with mass agitation, were the traditions of Jacobin communism rediscovered.
Revolution of 1830
Now, the next time the left opposition to the Bourbon regime unified for insurrectionary action they were successful ... much to their surprise. In the limited parliament, despite the various laws, the liberals were still gaining and finally won a majority. Then the king decided to pull a coup
d’état and declared, "We are dissolving parliament, and we are having total censorship of the press."
Some journalists, among them Louis Auguste Blanqui, although he was not a leader, said, "We refuse.' We protest.'" Some of them were arrested, and the cops knocked on the doors.
It was the spark that was needed to set off the Parisian masses. Among them were all these Bonapartist army officers, who were much better than the French army of the day, which had been purged to make it impossible for France to conquer the other countries anymore. After three days of street fighting, the French army was defeated, decisively driven out of Paris.
Now this should have been, as the radicals and the Saint-Simonians ex-pected the beginning of the second French Revolution. Hazard, the leader of the Saint-Simonians, went to his old friend Lafayette. As the historic leader of the liberal opposition Lafayette was now head of the de facto state power, the so-called National Guard, which was the military arm of the bourgeoisie in Paris. And he said, "Look Lafayette, this is my program, it's a communist program. You be a communist dictator, and we'll support you." And Lafayette stared at him.
Then the liberal pretender—the king's cousin—visited Lafayette along with a banker named Lafitte; Lafayette says, “I am a republican"; the liberal pretender exclaims, "So am I"; and the banker says, "Look, you don't want a lot of trouble." So Lafayette says, "Okay," and they went out—there's a famous kiss of reconciliation in front of the masses of -Paris. When the republicans cried "Betrayal!," they were beaten up and suppressed.
So the French Revolution simply led from an attempted absolutist monarchy to a somewhat more liberal one, although becoming increasingly repressive, in which the Parisian masses and particularly the left—the left wing of the left wing being Saint-Simonian socialists—rightly felt themselves betrayed. It took approximately five years for the new regime to consolidate itself, and the period between the revolution of 1830 and the great repression of 1835 was a continued series of attempts, some of them having a mass character, to carry the revolution of 1830 to a successful conclusion.
The first phase of the struggle, spearheaded by the organization called the Society of the Friends of the People, was simply leftist insurrections in Paris. They felt that the masses would never accept this king, and every couple of months they would rally the students, whatever artisans they could collect, and some disgruntled soldiers and simply attack the state. Blanqui was the vice president of the Society of the Friends of the People and was arrested for student agitation. This is for the SYL: in case anybody puts down agitating on campus, you can point to Blanqui, who never thought that agitating on campus was beneath his dignity.
Buonarroti and the Continuity of Revolutionary Jacobinism
Now, by 1832 the revolutionary democrats had gotten a little bloodied, and they formed another organization with a somewhat longer range and propagandistic purpose, called the Society of the Rights of Man. This was the first mass democratic organization in which revolutionary communists were a serious contender for factional power and the first revolutionary organization which intersected and in a certain sense led the mass organizations of the pre-industrial proletariat.
During 1832-34 in the Society of the Rights of Man there were two factions. The orthodox Jacobin faction republished Robespierre's writings, Robespierre's "Rights of Man," and could be called revolutionary bourgeois democrats anticipating social democracy. And the other faction, the outright Jacobin communist faction organized by Buonarroti, also claimed the same historic tradition. The 1833 program of the agents of Buonarroti within the Society of the Rights of Man declared:
"All property, movable or immovable, contained within the national territory, or anywhere possessed by its citizens, belongs to the people, who alone can regulate its distribution. Labor is a debt which every healthy citizen owes to society, idleness ought to be branded as a robbery and as a perpetual source of immorality."
[—Louis Blanc, History of Ten Years, 1830-1840}
And it was through the Society of the Rights of Man that Buonarroti in the last four or five years of his life was able to intersect a new revolutionary • generation and win them to the traditions of Jacobin communism.
Class Battles at Lyons
Now, after 1832, the scene of the major revolutionary battles in France shifts to the provincial industrial city of Lyons, which was the main concentration of the pre-industrial French working class concentrated in the silk industry, which was producing for the world market. In 1831, as a result of a wage struggle, they had a demonstration, the bourgeois National Guard attacked them, and they attacked back. The army vacillated, because after the revolution of 1830 the army was a little wary of going against the people—they had gone against it and lost. The weavers took over the city, but they had no ulterior political motives. They said, "Here, we don't want the city, you can have it back." So then, of course, the army came in and smashed them.
The silk weavers, however, were organized in a pre-industrial union known as the Mutualists. At the same time there were these burgeoning bourgeois-democratic-cum-communist propaganda groups in Lyons which sought to intersect the Mutualists. The leadership of the first unions were not socialists or revolutionary democrats but rather traditionalists heavily influenced by the clergy. It was only through a long period of struggle that the revolutionary democrats and the communists among them were able to penetrate the organizations of the pre-industrial working class and to win the masses.
The relationship between the Society of the Rights of Man and the silkweavers1 union has been described by Louis Blanc, the leading socialist historian writing in the 1840's in his History of Ten Years:
"We have said that a considerable number of Mutualists had entered the Society [the Society of the Rights of M an] but they had done so as individuals, for as the Mutualists societies considered collectively and in its tendency, it is certain that in the period in question, it was governed by a narrow corporate spirit. Above all, it was bent on preserving its industrial physiognomy, its originality, and all that constituted for it a situation apart amongst the working classes. No doubt, there were amongst it men exalted above their feelings. But these men did not constitute the majority, all whose interests might be summed up in increased wages for silk weavers. The influence of the clergy, moreover, over the class of silk weavers in Lyons has always been rather considerable. Now the following was the spirit in which was exercised this influence, of which women were the inconspicuous but efficient agents. The clergy, beholding in the manufacturers but liberals and skeptics, had felt no inclination to damp a disposition to revolt which animated the workmen against them. But at the same time it urged the latter to distrust the republican party but taking advantage of its sympathies. Now this was in fact precisely the conduct towards the Society by the leaders of Mutualism; for while they suffered themselves to be charged with republicanism, and availed themselves against the manufacturers in the popular diatribes of the Glaneusse [the republican press] they spared nothing to deaden the republican propaganda in the lodges."
Communist Ideology and Proletarian Struggles
The famous dictum of Lenin [in What Is To Be Done?] that socialist ideology must be brought to the proletariat from without is not a programmatic statement. It is not even a theoretical statement. It is an indisputable historical fact.
The communist movement has a prehistory, and the mass economic organizations of the proletariat have different prehistories. The communist movement arose out of the left wing of the bourgeois-democratic movement and, in its earliest phases, its mass base was essentially the young intellectuals concentrated among students. The mass economic organizations of the working class go back to the earliest mercantilist period, and their earliest natural leaders tended to be the clergy. The communist movement" arising out of the democratic movement and the trade unions emerging out of the artisan guilds intersect, and the workers movement is shaped by that intersection. But at every point there is a deep ideological struggle between the revolutionary democrats or socialists and the Catholic priests in France, or the Russian Orthodox priests in Russia, or the Methodists in England.
As a result of their experiences the leaders of the Mutualists, who were traditionalists and monarchists, appealed to the king and sought reforms, but at every point they were thwarted. Then in 1834 the Orleans monarchy attempted to totally suppress the left opposition, mainly the political opposition, with the so-called Law of Associations, which banned all associations. While these laws were mainly directed at political associations, they also affected the economic organizations of the workers.
So the Lyons silk weavers said, "You attempt to ban our organizations and we will fight." And they fought. There was a mass meeting, jointly called by the Society of the Rights of Man and the silk weavers' union and appealing to
other workers organizations in Lyons; they called a mass demonstration in April, 1834. When the army attempted to suppress the demonstration, the greatest revolutionary violence in France between the revolution of 1830 and those of 1848 occurred in Lyons-six days of fighting, in which hundreds, mainly silk weavers, were killed.
The leaders were repressed in a so-called "Monster Trial," in which both the political left opposition, including virtually all the leaders of the Society of the Rights of Man, and the leaders of the silk weavers were charged with conspiracy and insurrection and were imprisoned. After 1834 Lyons was a Red City for three decades; every communist tendency, Buonarroti, Blanqui, Cabet, had an organic base among the silk weavers in Lyons—until the industry essentially disintegrated in the 1860's. But it didn't begin that way.
Blanqui-Insurrectionary Communism
Blanquism as an identifiable doctrine is a product of the suppression of open insurrectionary activity culminating in the so-called "Monster Trial" of 1835. Blanqui had been a revolutionary activist since the age of 17. He had fought in all the street battles and had been decorated for his role in the revolution of 1830 by the new king. Until 1833-34, however, he was simply one of the boys, in no sense distinguishable, except by his personal courage, from three or four dozen other revolutionary democrats.
In prison between 1832 and 1834 he became a communist, but without particular doctrinal sophistication. He always pooh-poohed attempts to describe the nature of communist society. In prison he developed not the goal of communism, which as I said always had a very general characteristic, but strategic conceptions which were so radically different than those of his contemporaries that they constituted a new and distinct political tendency.
Blanqui asked himself two questions. First, why have all of the insurrections since 1830 failed? And second, why did the revolution of 1830, which succeeded in a military sense, also fail, bringing into power a regime which was at best only quantitatively less reactionary than the regime the masses had replaced?
Blanqui rejected the French revolutionary model which had inspired
Buonarroti: you begin with a bloc with the liberals or even the constitutional monarchists, and then you have the gradual radicalization of the revolution. Historical experience had proven impossible the replication of the experience of the French revolution, that is, the gradual radicalization beginning with a broad unity of all the opponents of the existing regime and then narrowing it down.
Instead, Blanqui insisted that communists must overthrow the government and directly rule. So he created what was in fact a secret army: the army was secret from the authorities, and the leadership of the army was secret from the ranks. He organized secret societies, such as the Society of Families and later, in the late 1830's, the Society of the Seasons.
In order to enter one of these societies, you were asked questions and you had to give the right answers, the revolutionary catechism. This is the catechism of the Society of the Families, 1836:
"What is the people? The people is the mass of citizens who work. What is the fate of the proletariat under the government of the rich? Its fate is the same as that of the serf and the Negro. It is clearly a long tale of hardship, fatigue and suffering. Must one make a political or social revolution? One must make a social revolution."
[—Samuel H. Bernstein, Blanqui and the Art of Insurrection]
You answer those three things correctly, and three years later you'll be fighting it out with the army in the streets of Paris.
The Society of the Seasons was not only a French organization; it had a German appendage, which for the history of Marxism is important. There was a large German population in Paris in the 1830's, heavily artisan. In Paris there was the so-called German Republican Party which contained all of the democrats. A man named Theodore Schuster, who by some curious coincidence was a friend of Buonarroti, formed a faction in the German Republican Party, split the party and from that split arose an organization called the League of the Just. When Buonarroti died in 1837, Blanqui inherited his constituency and formed a military bloc with the League of the Just, at that time a handful of communist intellectuals and a base of German artisans.
So, one nice spring day in 1839, a thousand Frenchmen and Germans, largely artisan, met for their routine military exercise in downtown Paris. But this time Blanqui and his lieutenant Barbes walked up and said, "Gentlemen, we are your leadership, and this is it!" They broke into a gunsmith shop, and for the next couple of days they were fighting a very surprised French army.
How did Blanqui recruit this relatively large number of people willing to just walk into the streets of Paris and start shooting? In a certain sense, he didn't. Blanqui rallied the militant wing of the broader revolutionary democratic opposition, which in general tended to be of the plebeian social background. At his trial Blanqui was the only one who was a bourgeois. Everyone else, there were 30 some odd, were all either artisans or shopkeepers. They had nothing to lose.
This indicates an essential aspect of Blanquism which in a certain sense is the key to this talk. Blanquism was the intersection of two currents. On one hand, Blanquism represented the extreme militarist wing of the bourgeois-democratic revolution whose tactics, concepts and whose method of recruitment were conditioned by the existence of a broader bourgeois-democratic movement. On the other hand it also represented the nascent collectivist instincts and impulse of the plebeian and particularly urban artisan masses. If one liquidates that dialectical tension, one cannot understand Blanquism. And if one fails to understand Blanquism, then one cannot comprehend this entire period.
To be sure, the Blanqui/Barbes uprising of 1839 was a pure putsch. But Blanqui remained tied to the bourgeois-democratic revolution; he proposed a revolutionary provisional government which contained himself and his lieutenants, but also one of the leading democratic oppositionists who knew nothing about the putsch. He said, "This is the government, we take power, you're the president." Blanqui assumed that if he overthrew the state, then the more cautious, conservative bourgeois democrats would go along with him, and, moreover, would also be easily won to communism.
In a certain sense Blanqui was right. The king really wanted to execute Barbes, the Blanquist leader who was captured first; it was only fear of a mass insurrection and mass violence if Barbes and Blanqui were executed that prevented it. So that even though this was a pure putsch, it was profoundly popular, and the execution of these two revolutionaries would have been not only in the mass unpopular but also not in the interest of the liberal bourgeoisie: the Blanquists had the protection of the bourgeois democrats on the grounds that the revolutionary communists can be used, as in 1830. One is not talking about the Weather-
men. - One is talking about an insurrectionary act under conditions of severe repression.
Blanqui spent the 1840's in jail. Blanquism as an organized phenomenon disappeared. If you knew the right Paris cafes in the 1840's, you could walk in and somebody would come up to you, start talking, ask for money to buy guns and say, "Well, do you want to come to a meeting?" Dispersed revolutionary activity.
Marx had great respect for Blanqui. He certainly is the only figure in the 19th century who stands comparable to Marx. He was, however, critical and in some ways contemptuous of Blanqui's conceptions of organization.
In the early 1850's Marx wrote a scathing attack on the typical Parisian revolutionary conspirator in the form of a book review ["Review of A. Chenu's 'Les Conspirateurs'," in Saul K. Pad-over, Marx on Revolution]. And Marx said, "Oh, you're a bunch of Bohemians, declassed intellectuals, declassed proletarians, easily penetrated by the cops, tending to lead a dissolute life-style." Marx was very prudish, a very straight guy.
What distinguished Marx was his insistence that the communists must be tied to the workers—not simply the exceptional workers who were prepared to become professional revolutionaries —the mass of the workers through their established organizations. So that's the negative aspect of Blanquism which quite early on Marx rejected. But in the only two revolutionary situations in which Marx was involved during his lifetime—the Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune—Marx and Blanqui were forced together, and Marx on both occasions had to break with right-wing allies.
So, whatever his failing Blanqui insisted, again and again, on certain fundamental truths: namely, that one cannot build communism simply through cooperative bootstrap operations, which were very popular in that period; that you cannot establish communism unless the communists wield state power; and that the bourgeoisie is not going to establish a stable parliamentary democracy in which the communists could establish their constituency and by that means take over the government.
Engels, in a much later critique of the Blanquists, observed that Blanqui was a man of the pre-1848 period. But in some ways he was also a man of the post-1914 period—Blanqui above all grasped the centrality of the revolutionary overthrow of the state.
